Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth
If atheist Richard Dawkins believes he is right, as a recent Times profile once again suggests, why is he so afraid of passing it on to our kids?
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Believing in Johnny Cash: An Open Letter to Atheists
Several days ago I was in the car, listening to songs shuffled at random. Just as I pulled into the parking lot I heard the opening lines of “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” recorded at one of Cash’s famous 1968 Folsom Prison shows. Transfixed, I sat and listened to the whole seven-minute song, which tells the story of a man who, after winning a heart-pounding spike-driving competition against a machine, lays down his hammer and dies. It is a great story that may be read as a warning to those who equate scientific and technological advance with human progress. What I’d like to ask is this: do stories point us, in even the smallest of ways, toward anything that might be described as the truth?
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Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Church
The church, in its ignorance of and hostility to evolution, is passing up one of its greatest opportunities to apprehend the very God it claims to represent. This irony is due to a terrible case of what may be called “small-god-ism” and is, unfortunately, encouraged by much popular theology. This theology makes claims about scripture and church practice that reduce God to a cheerleader, or a cosmic vending machine, or some domesticated and pale image of our own confused selves.
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Way Beyond Atheism: God Does Not (Not) Exist
Most principled atheists do not go beyond simple denial. They refuse to go further, to seriously question the ground beneath their feet. And, by holding on, consciously or not, to their unjustified assumptions, they end up rejecting far too little.
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For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion
The Dalai Lama was just in Atlanta, visiting Emory University’s “Emory-Tibet Science Initiative.” There he spoke about the easy relationship between Buddhism and science. When you whittle it down to its essence, Buddhism is very simple and amenable to Enlightenment types.
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The Atheist Encounter with Christianity: A Failure to Disbelieve?
Skepticism means having the courage to suspend one’s set of beliefs long enough to take another set of beliefs really seriously. That is, real skepticism means disbelieving. So be as skeptical as possible but as open as possible, and remember that if one refuses to investigate religion in this way, then that is known as contempt prior to investigation—and is the death of the life of the mind.
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Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g
As you probably know, a couple of weeks ago the pope was in England smack-talking the atheists. What is generally less known is that, at the same moment that pope was having his say with the UK’s radical non-believers, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, also in England, was busy talking…
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